Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine

Ten miles off the New Hampshire coast, on the rocky little island of Appledore, the poet Celia Thaxter kept a cramped, blazing cottage garden. Every summer it drew writers, musicians and painters to her family's hotel, and Hassam was among the regulars through the 1890s. He painted the garden from inside it, close to the ground: red poppies tangled in green, and past them the pale hump of Babb's Rock and a strip of sea. He left the big hotel out of the frame entirely. A few years later he made watercolours for Thaxter's own book about the garden, 'An Island Garden', which came out in 1894, the same year she died. The flowers she planted are gone, but the island and that bare rock behind the poppies are still there.